Movie Review: Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Theatrical release.

By now, most people know that the long-awaited sequel to the mega-hit Top Gun from 1986, Top Gun: Maverick, was just released to theaters this past weekend.  The new movie, which was ready for release in 2020, was shelved for two years until it could be seen by audiences in theaters on big screens.

Tom Cruise, the movie’s star and one of the executive producers, was insistent that this film would not be released to streaming platforms until it could be seen in theaters first, and so it wasn’t throughout the first two years of the pandemic.  But it’s finally here, and it was well worth the wait, especially for fans of the original movie (who are legion).

It’s worth noting at the outset that the plot contains a large number of elements that are absurd, and just not believable from a rational standpoint.  But of course, we can always decide to suspend disbelieve, just as we would for a blockbuster science fiction film, in which case, strap in for an incredible and entertaining ride!

The absurd parts: a legendary fighter pilot now in advanced middle age is still in the Navy, stuck by his own individualistic misbehavior at the rank of captain in the role of a test pilot, but yet somehow not forced out of the service for failure to advance.  An unnamed hostile country possesses fighter planes that are way better than the F-18s (or for that matter, F-22s or F-35s) the U.S. military actually flies.  A 3-week “emergency” is created, where an elite team of pilots needs to train for and perform an impossible and unprovoked attack on the unnamed country’s new uranium processing plant.  And so on.

Of course, the original Top Gun film had a lot of the same sort of contrived and unrealistic plot devices to set up its story, and none of us who have watched and enjoyed it over the years have ever really cared about that, because the believable characters, the portrayal of the human relationships under stress within an elite world of competitive warriors, the humor, and the incredible aerial combat scenes more than made up for any trivial lack of story plausibility.

The new movie is absolutely faithful to those aspects of the original, while continuing the story of several of those personalities and relationships as they have aged and matured through time, and at the same time showcasing even more spectacularly realistic aerial footage than the original, as a new Top Gun team of "best of the best" fighter pilots trains for and then launches the seemingly impossible attack.

Much has been made of the extent to which this is a Tom Cruise showpiece, and it certainly is.  As a producer, he brought a long career’s worth of knowledge and experience about how to create outstanding action-packed cinematic entertainment, along with his expertise as a highly trained pilot (in real life), and his strong connections to the Navy from the original film, due to its decades-long value as a major recruiting tool for naval aviation.

But as an actor, he also brings authenticity to his portrayal of an older, sadder but wiser Maverick.  He’s still the dominant fighter pilot among the “best of the best”, and he still won’t follow orders if it doesn’t suit him, but he also knows how to act his age and life experience – struggling over whether he can teach his students what they need to survive, self-aware about the impact of pilots’ deaths on their families, and loving and compassionate toward his ailing friend and former Top Gun competitor Iceman (Val Kilmer), now the admiral who’s been providing “top cover” for Maverick’s checkered naval career over the years.

As is typical of Cruise, he also insisted on doing his own stunts to the extent possible, to make them look more realistic, although apparently (and not surprisingly) he did not actually pilot the Navy’s F-18s used in the movie.  He does briefly fly his own personally-owned World War II era P-51 Mustang fighter, which in the movie is one of Maverick’s fast-moving boy's toys, along with his iconic Kawasaki motorcycle.

If you’re ready to venture back into a movie theater, and you’re able to enjoy a film that is loud, visually overwhelming, blatantly militaristic and fantastical, but also epic entertainment with an uplifting story and likeable characters, Top Gun: Maverick should be at the top of your list for the summer.  It seems to be playing almost everywhere, so finding a theater near you that’s showing it shouldn’t be a problem, and in the near future, we can expect it to show up on one of the streaming services (although it won't be as grand or overpowering on the small screen).  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone (2021). Book 9 of the Outlander Series. Diana Gabaldon.

After a very long wait for legions of dedicated fans around the world, the latest installment in the epic Outlander series of novels by Diana Gabaldon (now also a major hit TV show from the Starz channel), arrived in November of 2021.  It’s the usual 900 pages or so of small, dense type (in the hardback version) – in other words, a very long read, but worth every minute of it, and the seven long years of waiting since Book 8 (Written in My Own Heart’s Blood) was released.

As the book begins, it’s 1779, and Jamie and Claire and their family are back together again at their frontier home on Fraser’s Ridge in rural North Carolina.  They’re safe for the moment, but the American revolution is moving south, and they know from their pre-knowledge of history that navigating the next two years of war, with all the fratricidal terror to come between Loyalists and Rebels, will be fraught with danger and hard choices.

As always, Gabaldon brings the characters and scenes totally alive, with fascinating attention to period detail, contrasted social and cultural mores and conditions between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, dramatic historical events described, and moving portrayals of many of the more timeless experiences of life, love and war.  No matter how long these books take to read, I never want them to end each time I start reading one of them.

When I started reading this series (some years ago now), I thought it might be a cheesy historical romance and bodice-ripper with some science fiction time-travel thrown in, but I soon realized it was serious literature and addictive historical fiction (with lovely occasional touches of the cosmically mysterious and fantastic) of the very best sort.  If you’ve read all the other books (and yes, they need to be read in order, at least the first time through), you’re definitely going to want to keep going, and read this one. 

Gabaldon has promised to write one final volume to end the series, and to reach the end of the American Revolution, but at one book every 5-7 years, it’s going to be a long wait for Book 10 (2028, maybe?).  In the meantime, if you haven't read this series, you'll have lots of time to catch up before the final volume arrives.  And if you have, you can always go back and re-read the previous nine books while you’re waiting!  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Unsheltered (2019). Barbara Kingsolver.

Unsheltered is a beautifully woven tale of parallel lives in a small rust belt town, one thread in the late nineteenth century and the other in modern times. 

Certain themes tie the two stories together across time: the physical location and the two different slowly disintegrating houses that stand on it, the family lives and their struggles with financial survival despite educations, intelligence and good will, and the small-mindedness and irrationality of some of their neighbors in each time and place.

Kingsolver is wonderful at capturing the internal monologues and feelings of characters, and the ebbs and flows of events and emotions within individuals and communities.   I definitely will go explore some of her other novels.  Recommended.

Book Review: Educated (2018). Tara Westover.

This autobiography is a gut-wrenching personal account by a young woman of growing up in a rural, extremist Mormon family in Idaho, dominated by a patriarchal father who believes in anti-government conspiracies, the end of the world, and his own personal brand of religious fanaticism.

Despite endless years of serious accidents and injuries from dangerous work and family car trips, physical and psychological abuse from a crazy brother and her father, a total lack of modern healthcare, social isolation and no schooling as a child, she ultimately got out, slowly separated herself from her family, and learned about the outside world and objective modern reality by becoming an educated person.

This autobiography is beautifully written and inspirational, and provides a stark picture of the extremes of opinion and behavior on the outer margins of American society. There may be a movie adaptation of this book coming out, but I haven't been able to find details of it online.  Highly recommended. 

TV Review: Bodyguard (2018). Netflix.

This 6-part mini-series from the BBC was a nice surprise when I finally decided to give it a try, after Netflix repeatedly displayed it prominently on my “you should see this” list.  Only one season was made, but a February 2022 online story suggests that the producers may be gearing up to make a new season 2.   In any event, the first season stands on its own as a complete story, solidly rooted in the geopolitical traumas and anxieties of our time. 

The main protagonist, Sgt. David Budd (played by Richard Madden) is a veteran of 10 years of war with the British military in Afghanistan and Iraq, who now works as a personal protection officer (a bodyguard) for the Scotland Yard division that protects important British government officials.

In an early scene, while riding with his two young children on a train, he recognizes a terrorist plot unfolding, and intervenes to stop a suicide bombing before it happens, thereby saving both the train’s passengers and the woman bomber, and in the process becoming an instant hero in the press.

In a very believable story of “no good deed goes unpunished”, David is quickly rewarded for his heroism with a new assignment as the personal bodyguard for Julia, the Home Secretary and top Conservative woman MP in the government (Keeley Hawes), who is campaigning to undermine and replace the current Prime Minister.

To her new Police Sergeant protector, the Home Secretary represents all the worst judgment, bad policies, jingoism and hypocrisy that led to the disastrous wars he fought in, which have left him psychologically damaged, bitter and now alienated from his wife.  Nevertheless, his devotion to duty won’t allow him to do anything but guard her ferociously with his life, and try to anticipate the evolving threats which she seems to draw like a magnet.

Without revealing the full plot and spoiling it, I would say that this excellent series reminds me more than anything of the long-running HBO show Homeland.  In both shows, we see an exceptionally competent and dedicated agent, each with a heavy load of psychological damage from their respective war experiences, trying to stay one step ahead of complex terrorism plots, while also trying to deal with layers of bureaucratic intrigue in their own organizations, and their own disturbed personal lives, loves and families.  It makes for an absorbing and complex story in both cases.

Bodyguard also includes several of the most adrenaline-pumping action scenes of a character under threat of immediate death, trying to hold things together and get everyone safely through a moment of impending mayhem, that I have seen in recent years.  In an entertainment world full of spectacular CGI car crashes, gratuitous gunfire and colorful explosions, these scenes stand out for their close-up focus on the drama of characters trying to survive under the pressure of imminent catastrophe.

This is a fine example of the contemporary political thriller, with plausible scenarios and realistic threats unfolding in the uniquely British context of the post-Forever Wars world.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Unrequited Infatuations (2021). Stevie Van Zandt.

This rock and roll autobiography is an unusual one, in part because it is told by someone who is not the “front man” for a band, or a major solo act himself.  This is a “sideman’s” story.  

For those who don’t know, Van Zandt, also known as “Little Stevie”, is a close friend and confidante of Bruce Springsteen.  He became a founding member, guitarist and backup singer of Springsteen’s E Street Band, and Springsteen’s right-hand man in the early years, only to quit in the 1980s, just as the band was reaching its peak years of popularity. 

As he recounts, he returned to the band many years later, but only after building his own separate life and identity as a musician, political activist, actor, script-writer and producer, as well as a celebrity gadfly, solo artist, band-leader, project organizer and friend to many other stars.  

His style of story-telling seemed to verge at times on the bombastic, self-admiring and grandiose, and might have been intolerable except for the fact that all the outrageous claims he makes and the crazy stories he tells are apparently true, and are often very funny.  It also helps make it more bearable that he openly shares his failures and insecurities too.  

But yes, he did play a huge part in organizing financial, political and celebrity support in the U.S. against South African apartheid, and in support of Nelson Mandela.  He did become an actor, and a major star in The Sopranos, one of the top TV series of all time.  He did star in and help produce another improbable but popular gangster-related Netflix show set in Norway, Lilyhammer.  And he does seem to know just about everyone in the celebrity world, and has wild stories and gossip to share about his interactions with many of them.  

If you’re looking for a fun read, and lots of tall tales from the life of a high-powered Forrest Gump of the entertainment world, this book might fill the bill.  Recommended.

Book Review: Born to Run (2016). Bruce Springsteen.

The Boss's long-awaited autobiography finally appeared in 2016.  It explores in the first person the same kind of personal and emotional territory as was covered in the Tom Petty biography Petty, which I previously reviewed.

In fact, Springsteen and Petty, the two most beloved and iconic American rock stars of our age,  have similar stories in so many respects:  growing up poor, surviving abusive and neglectful fathers, youths spent in 1960s garage rock bands, struggling with depression throughout their careers, and tending to the difficult process of building and managing extraordinarily tight-knit bands of gifted musical subordinates and collaborators over long periods of time. 

They both experienced the incredible highs of performing live in front of huge adoring audiences, writing hundreds of popular songs, creating great records in the studio, and working with many of the other luminaries of the rock music world over their respective 40+ year careers.

Yet at the same time, in both these books, we see them going through many of the same kinds of personal and family ups and downs that we all have in our own lives. 

Fortunately for the millions of fans worldwide of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, he's still here, and still making great music, as he demonstrated last year with the release of his first rock album and accompanying movie in seven years, Letter to You, also previously reviewed here.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Holiday in the Wild (2021). Netflix.

This movie on Netflix was a nice evening's diversion as a light entertainment.  A wealthy New York woman (Kristin Davis), whose only son had just headed off to college, is dumped out of the blue by her husband.  

To make things worse, the newly empty-nest couple in this movie plot had had a "second honeymoon" planned, an exotic African safari, so the suddenly single wife decides to go on the trip to Africa by herself instead.  

At the first hotel stop, she meets a seemingly rough and boorish local character at dinner (Rob Lowe), only to discover the next morning that he is her pilot for the flight out to the start point for the safari.  But along the way, he lands the plane in the African wilderness to save a baby elephant, and she goes to work at the nearby elephant rescue camp, where she rediscovers her calling as a veterinarian, and slowly falls in love with the pilot.  

It seemed to me to be a sort of modern Out of Africa lite, but with more romance and comedy. Recommended.

TV Review: Babies (2020). Netflix.

This is a six-part documentary series on the first 12 months of babies' mental and physical development, and glimpses into ongoing research at universities around the globe into the many aspects of babies' growth.  

Its basic thesis is that much of what we used to think about babies as being "tabula rasa" or blank slates is simply not true.  Instead, they arrive with seemingly miraculous stores of built-in knowledge and skills, which they then actualize through their many strange and wonderful behaviors in the first year of life, which are demonstrated by babies in families from different places around the world.  Perfect for new parents (and grandparents)!   Recommended.

Book Review: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2020). Bill McGibben.

This is another in the genre of books about the accelerating global climate crisis, written by the noted environmental and climate change writer and activist Bill McGibben.  However, in addition to considering the existential peril of climate change, McGibben also looks at a couple of other looming threats to human survival and identity:  genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. 

In the course of a very thoughtful and philosophical analysis, he suggests that we need to look critically at these technological marvels we are being offered, and think about what their adoption will do to the human story, and what it means to be a human on this planet.  

He asks, do we want to live in a totally human-managed environment, given how little we really know about how nature works, and how badly many of our attempts to manage the environment have turned out?   Do we want every person (or at least every child of the most wealthy among us) to be an engineered product, who will inevitably be followed by newer and "better" versions?  What about the ethics and good sense of trying to create artificial "intelligence" to replace our own human minds and activities -- is this either desirable, or moral?   

These are all very urgent questions, well considered.  It’s an interesting and in some respects more hopeful treatise than we might expect, given the dire nature of our current technological times and problems.  Recommended.

Book Review: A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age (2015). Matt Richtel.

This morning, I read an excellent opinion piece from yesterday's New York Times by Jay Caspian Kang, entitled "Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn't Have".  It describes the evolutionary design process by which for most new cars today, the designers have replaced the old familiar knobs and buttons that were simple to find and easy to use for controlling all the car's environmental systems, with ever larger touch screens that require the same sort of complex viewing, touching and menu-searching we have to do with our phones.

In the article, Mr. Kang argues that not only did we not need these new solutions to how to control the heat, air conditioning and sound systems in our cars, but in fact these screens have created a major new safety problem, by creating an array of new distractions that take our eyes off the road and our minds off the task of driving, while we search for little icons and  hard-to-find virtual buttons, and page through menus of options to try to manage our cars' systems and environment.

With this in mind, today I'm posting a short review of the 2015 book A Deadly Wandering, also by a New York Times writer, which is the brilliantly told, gripping and emotional account of one of the early cases of a fatal automobile accident caused by a teenager texting while driving. 

The author weaves a spellbinding story, as he cycles the narration between the personalities and lives affected by the accident, the psychologists working on trying to understand the brain and the science of attention, and the political and legal players trying to adjust and respond to new distracting technologies as they affect drivers and the public interest.   

One of the most important points the book drives home is what the scientific research has shown about how long it takes our conscious minds to return to fully and effectively doing what they were doing before (such as driving the car and being road-aware) after changing focus to send a text, or otherwise engage in some computer-related activity.  The numbers are sobering: in the case of Mr. Kang's article this morning, the figure he quoted for the new touch screens was 40 seconds.  That's a long time to have nobody driving your car while it's in motion.

A Deadly Wandering is a crucial book for all of us as drivers, to understand what we risk in trying to operate our phones (or our touch screens) while we're driving.  It ought to be required reading for automobile designers and manufacturers, and government safety regulators as well.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: X Troop (2021). Leah Garrett.

This is another story from the endless byways of World War II, and the many different individual and collective experiences of it.  Garrett’s book reveals the existence of a small but highly effective and lethal unit of Jewish commandos in the British army in World War II, made up exclusively of young refugees from Europe.  

I was expecting that this book might be a real-life “Inglorious Basterds” story, and there were elements of that, but the most important and disturbing part had to do with how they ended up as elite special operators for the British.  The unexpected story there, which I had never heard before, was that many of the Jewish children and young adults who escaped from European countries to Great Britain in the early years of the war were initially treated as “Enemy Aliens” by the British.  

Despite their hatred for Hitler and fascism, they were put into individual family homes and children's’ detention camps, where they lost communications with their families in Europe and the outside world, were often treated harshly as possible Nazi sympathizers, and were sometimes imprisoned in close quarters with real Nazi supporters who were also being held as enemy aliens. 

Several groups of these young Jewish refugees (who were basically regarded as prisoners of war by the British government) were sent to other Commonwealth countries.  One of the worst of these forced deportations of young Jewish men took the form of a hideous voyage on a freighter full of young European “enemy” refugees, taking them to detention camps in Australia.  On this particular long passage to the south Pacific, the young Jews aboard the ship were tormented and subjected to harsh abuse not only by Nazi-sympathizing fellow “enemy aliens”, but also by the sadistic and anti-Semitic English ship captain.  

Even when Great Britain finally decided that perhaps these angry young Jews might add something to the fight in Europe, for more than a year they were limited to serving in a nonmilitary support organization, until the Churchill government finally realized they had a group of determined, well-educated and tough young Jewish survivors, with extensive knowledge of European cultures and languages, that could be put to effective use in the armed struggle against Hitler. 

The second half of the book recounts the combat and intelligence exploits of some of the most prominent members of this group, which were heroic, but similar to the war stories and experiences of many other Allied special operations fighters and spies.  Recommended.   

Book Review: After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021). Bruce Greyson, MD.

This recent book by one of the world’s leading scientific experts on Near Death Experiences (NDEs) is an account of what is now known about NDEs, based on his career of collecting data about them, analyzing the data, researching historical NDE anecdotes and beliefs, and working with other researchers. It is also an account of his personal journey in deciding to study them, and then dedicating a major portion of his career as a physician to designing and carrying out this unusual research on what he knew from the outset was a controversial topic.

Dr. Greyson faced many of the same sorts of institutional skepticism and resistance to his pursuit of understanding of this phenomenon that other researchers have confronted in what I call “mysteries of life” topics (i.e., frequently-reported phenomena that are “paranormal” or unexplained by conventional materialist science). Nevertheless, as a practicing psychiatrist, he kept hearing descriptions of these strange and psychologically impactful experiences, many of them sharing common features, and ultimately couldn’t avoid trying to understand this puzzling reported experience which kept turning up in patients he treated who had been through serious medical emergencies.

It was intriguing to me that although he has taught at several different prestigious university medical schools during his career, he ended up at the University of Virginia, working closely with both Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker, two of the leading psychiatrist researchers into the phenomenon of young children who appear to remember details of past lives.

All three of these doctors, and others among their colleagues, seem to share a deep curiosity about what is behind the shades of what we normally accept as material reality, and particularly the nature of the relationship between mind and brain, which has been a central philosophical and religious issue since antiquity.

As with recent attempts to study other “paranormal” phenomena using scientific methods of interviewing via a structured approach, and applying quantification and analysis of frequently recurring aspects to patients’ stories (techniques that Greyson pioneered with respect to NDE research), at the end we’re still left with unresolved questions. Do minds exist independent of physical bodies and brains? We still don’t know, but Greyson’s account adds more evidence to the possibility that they do.

But beyond those cosmic questions, Dr. Greyson’s research also yields many fascinating insights into the psychological impacts of NDEs on experiencers, and the people around them. There is an insightful exploration of how NDEs can change the personalities of those who have them, not always for the better in terms of their own happiness, although gaining a heightened appreciation for preserving life and being more kind and loving to others seems to be a common tendency among many survivors. 

He reveals other surprising commonalities across reported NDEs. One category of cases involves people in the near-death state who seem to know about the deaths of other people in remote locations, before it is known to them in their waking state, or to the people around them.

He describes other cases where patients in this NDE unconscious state seemed to have viewed details of what was going on around them and nearby (outside the room where their body was lying) when they were definitely unconscious, including one eerie episode which happened to him when he was first practicing medicine, and played an important part in convincing him to undertake this line of research.

Another fascinating finding he revealed was that while most NDE experiences seem to involve meeting or becoming aware of an all-powerful deity of some sort, there was no consistent correlation between that and the experiencers’ prior or subsequent religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

For anyone interested in NDEs, and how they fit into the other mysteries of our existence, this is an intriguing, compassionate and ultimately comforting introduction. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (2019). Andy Greenberg.

This book is about the rise of cyber war over the past 15 years, particularly with respect to the Russian intelligence teams that have developed, stolen and tested attacks that shut down and destroyed physical infrastructure as well as computing and data resources in Estonia, Georgia, and especially Ukraine. 

With the NotPetya worm, they attacked major businesses and organizations around the world, causing billions of dollars in losses, and disrupting key social infrastructure, including transportation, power grids and utilities, financial institutions and many other businesses and health care organizations. 

The notorious social influence operations of these Russian teams (including the U.S. 2016 presidential election) is mentioned throughout, but the main focus is on their attacks with direct impacts on the physical machinery and computer systems that support modern life and civilization.

One of the best behind the scenes accounts I've read on these ongoing IT security threats to our infrastructure, which is of elevated importance now due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Russia's deteriorating geopolitical and financial situation.  Recommended.

Book Review: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers, and Why They Matter (2018). Ben Goldfarb.

One of the best full-length books about nature and ecology that I've read recently, this book by writer and "Beaver Believer" Goldfarb explains how the beaver, that funny-looking rodent with the big tail that chops down trees to make ponds, is actually one of the most important mammalian species for restoring natural environments and landscapes.  

In the course of the book, we learn about how beavers, who Goldfarb describes as “nature’s engineers”, shaped the earlier natural environment of America before the European settlers arrived, with its endless marshes, swamps and wetlands full of life, but how that rich and boggy terrain was transformed and damaged by the wholesale slaughter of beavers during the fur-trading era of North American exploration and European settlement.  

We also find out about the modern naturalists who have figured out how brilliantly these little nuisances can design and build dams and ponds, to great effect in restoring and reclaiming damaged landscapes, and how the more annoying results of their work (as they affect farmers and cattle ranchers) can be successfully managed and mitigated.  

A wonderful story of wild animals, their complex roles and inter-dependencies in the natural world and our ongoing human attempts to understand and interact with them.  Highly recommended.